Joystick Connection Issues

[Mark McLeod]

1. Keep your laptop plugged in at all times while on the field.
2. Change your USB device settings to disallow Windows from cutting power to the USB ports to save power when the laptop is not plugged in.
3. Test your controllers every match after you've connected to the field (look for the Setup tab blue when pushing a controller button).
4. Don't let your laptop go to sleep or hibernate. The USB power gets re-negotiated when Windows wakes up.

Warning: power hungry controllers may brown out during competition. Basic controllers (no fancy lights) connected directly to the laptop USB ports (not hubs) are safest. When the driver station laptop battery gets low it begins to cut power to USB ports starting with the ports with the highest power drain. Usually, that means starting with ports connected to bigger drain USB hubs that have several devices hanging off them.
Changing Windows USB Power Settings

[Jared]

We also experienced a weird issue like this today. In autonomous, our robot worked fine. Once we got to teleop, two of our three joysticks stopped responding, and when I went to the driver station setup tab, the driver station stopped responding, which I've never seen before. The driver station came back after around ten seconds, and I pushed F1, and the joysticks came back.

It's worth noting that this problem only happened to us on the field, and did happen after the laptop was woken from sleep mode, but that we ran about half our matches with the laptop just waking from sleep. The laptop was plugged in, the USB power save mode was off, and the joystick names turned blue when a button was pushed about 20 seconds before the match began.

Another team seemed to experience the same exact issue, where they had communication with the field and were enabled, but their joysticks didn't work for the first 20 seconds. It's probably just a USB driver issue.

[bkahl]

F1 is the driver's best friend.